[D] Career advice: Can one make a career in building machine learning models and then selling the IP for them?

Submitted by likeamanyfacedgod t3_y20f1w in MachineLearning

I have an ML tool which I built in my free time which predicts something to a relatively high accuracy, and I think it is quite valuable. I was wondering if I would be able to sell the intellectual property to this tool to a company that would find it useful. Is that actually something that people ever do? What I'm getting at is analogous to someone selling the patent to an invention that they have. Has anyone ever heard of that? Thanks!

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lawrebx t1_is0fg9r wrote

Probability is low.

In the U.S. you can patent the steps to the algo as “mathematical steps and procedures”, but you cannot patent the algo itself.

You’re better off just building a product around your IP and holding it close to the chest. If it’s really that great, you’ll have differential performance that would be hard to replicate.

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ragamufin t1_is0k4o4 wrote

Probably not. You can try to build a company around it, serve it via API, and do MaaS. Look at Kensho as an example. If you’re doing something truly revolutionary you could end up north of 100m.

More likely you should just get a job as a data scientist.

What does your model predict and how good is it?

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likeamanyfacedgod OP t1_is5a8en wrote

hey, it predicts traffic jams with a 87% AUC. But that is besides the point, I'm wondering if people actually sell models in the that way.

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ragamufin t1_is648yz wrote

Not exactly. Most often you need to stand up a company and do MaaS. So you need sales folks and a website and probably a product guy, some full stack devs to build functional architecture for I/O, selling compute, etc.

You also need to start building your datasets because often clients are going to come to you without the data the model needs.

Another good example that was recently acquired is goldfire.ai

These guys built a really good NLP model. Sold it as a tool and an interface for interacting with it (MaaS) Built up a book of business and sold the company to a multinational.

Building a good model is hard, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Next stop is incorporate and start working on your bells and whistles.

My thesis was on fleet management and dynamic traffic assignment so I’m intrigued. Who would you sell this to? Will they have the data the model needs or will you have to help them build the pipelines?

How do they generate revenue with the model?

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walterlawless t1_is082c7 wrote

What does your tool predict?

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Intelligent-Spray-39 t1_is0up2p wrote

Them: can't say

You: why not?

Them: because you might steal my idea

You: but, you are going to try selling your algorithm

Them: yes

You: won't you need to explain what it does?

Them: yes

You: so your afraid of random internet strangers stealing your idea, but you are happy to explain what it does to the people who are actually in the market for it? Presumably people with access to the resources to replicate your model?

Them:

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likeamanyfacedgod OP t1_is59m1a wrote

Are you on drugs?

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Intelligent-Spray-39 t1_is5btvd wrote

Yes. I'm taking SS Bron which is an over the counter codiene based medication for my cold. Codiene is an opiate and is harvested from the sap of the opium poppy (much like heroin). I'm in Japan and constitutes as over the counter medicine is a bit loosey goosey here.

That said, my point remains valid.

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likeamanyfacedgod OP t1_is73eq4 wrote

How can your point remain valid when I've been openly telling people what my model predicts? I just like to lead my life outside of the internet between posts and thus can take a while to reply to people ;)

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Intelligent-Spray-39 t1_is75dfo wrote

That's not how this is supposed to work. You make a post and then spend the next 48hrs frantically refreshing your phone.

Do you even have self esteem issues?

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likeamanyfacedgod OP t1_is9mphl wrote

Why are you in Japan?

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Intelligent-Spray-39 t1_is9pppw wrote

I'm a professor. My research is machine learning (linguistics) related, but I teach English.

It's easier to get an English teaching position in Japan than a Linguistics teaching position in Australia.

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rikiiyer t1_is07xlk wrote

What you’re describing sounds like an AutoML tool, of which dozens already exist. Various companies offer a subscription service to access an API for their tool, and charge by usage/time. Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see why companies would lease IP rather than just use a service. Like AutoML software is typically used by companies who have very few ML experts on their team so the API makes it easy for engineers to integrate ML into their products, while companies with many ML experts usually just build their own AutoML tools

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Emergency-Agreeable t1_is0ey4z wrote

The IP is in the data I’m afraid not the ML model applied to them. There is a reason you have to pay for useful data but not for ML libraries. Also, more often than not there is an actual labor cost behind a good data set.

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sqweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeps t1_is0txg7 wrote

Sure, if your model is really good. But why wouldn’t companies just use a state-of-the-art model from published papers and just implement that for free? Better yet, if you are able to come up with extremely high accuracy models that beat state of the art, why not have a salary as an MLE or ML researcher which are very high paying jobs?

TLDR: you could theoretically, but you probably won’t have a good enough model to do so, or else you would have a better job

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BLECQ1 t1_is0y4lu wrote

>TLDR: you could theoretically, but you probably won’t have a good enough model to do so, or else you would have a better job

You make it sound like working for a company and getting a fixed job is the only/best route. Why not be a freelancer and build the stuf that you're excited about instead.

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sqweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeps t1_is0yhb4 wrote

Because that stuff is most likely not profitable. Job security sounds great, pay sounds great, no hassle on finding companies to sell to, overall freelance in ML does not sound fun. There’s plenty of jobs out there for building ml pipelines.

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onkus t1_is0mvfr wrote

Im not following, are you trying to sell licences for your tool. Or patent your tool and sell those rights? As others have said, there are a plethora of existing protected tools, i doubt you can do the latter.

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likeamanyfacedgod OP t1_is0nr3t wrote

well it's purely theoretical for now. Imagine that I create a tool that predicts something important with a high degree of accuracy. And this tool - whilst many other machine learning engineers could also make it if they took the required time - is not something you can make in a week after following a few "towardsdatasci" articles... And then imagine that other companies are interested in predicting that thing. It may be the case that a few other companies have/claim to have a similar tool that's equally as accurate. Those companies could either A) employ their own data science team to recreate the tool and hope that that team can achieve the same accuracy. Or B) Buy my tool and have something that's guaranteed to work. So my question is: does "B" from the above ever actually happen in practice?

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z_fi t1_is0sobt wrote

Yes, and this is why business and sales people make a ton of money.

A great technology isn’t valuable unless you know how to monetize it

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Battleagainstentropy t1_is0vlku wrote

Most companies for whom this would be valuable have professional teams that would be working on this problem. What is your advantage over them building it internally? Do you have access to some resource like data that the industry doesn’t? This kind of thing exists for sure, but it’s typically started by people who are in the industry already, understand from the inside what the weaknesses and blind spots are of existing state of the art, then go off on their own to address them.

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onkus t1_is2aa0r wrote

You cannot patent an embodiment of a thing. Unless you develop a novel method or system which is also suitable (there are more hurdles to clear) then you cannot file IP on it.

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BLECQ1 t1_is0u3fv wrote

Hey, great question!
We're definitely a long way from that, but solving that problem is exactly something we hope to do in the near-future. Enabling people to benefit from the value they created by building ML-models but also by making the data available to ML-engineers in the first place. We're basically building a platform for exactly that to happen, but we're still in the early stages and working on the fundamentals. (building infrastructure, making sure data remains private etc.) Just released our alpha though, let me know if you want to check it out!

TLDR: I think it might currently be hard to monetize your IP but if you ask me that will probably change relatively soon!

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serge_cell t1_isnc4q3 wrote

No, but that doesn't mean that you wouldn't be able to monetarize it somewhat. Put it on github and link it to your CV/linkedin. You would likely get better offers form potential employers, especially if your project get some starts.

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